Without being more curious than my neighbors, there are
several social mysteries that I should like to fathom, among
others, the real reasons that induce the different classes of
people one sees at the opera to attend that form of
entertainment.
A taste for the theatre is natural enough. It is also
easy to understand why people who are fond of sport and animals
enjoy races and dog shows. But the continued vogue of grand
opera, and more especially of Wagner’s long-drawn-out
compositions, among our restless, unmusical compatriots, remains
unexplained.
The sheeplike docility of our public is apparent in numberless
ways; in none, however, more strikingly than in their choice of
amusements. In business and religion, people occasionally
think for themselves; in the selection of entertainments, never!
but are apparently content to receive their opinions and
prejudices ready-made from some unseen and omnipotent
Areopagus.
The careful study of an opera audience from different parts of
our auditorium has brought me to the conclusion that the public
there may be loosely divided into three classes—leaving out
reporters of fashionable intelligence, dressmakers in search of
ideas, and the lady inhabitants of “Crank Alley” (as
a certain corner of the orchestra is called), who sit in
perpetual adoration before the elderly tenor.
First—but before venturing further on dangerously thin
ice, it may be as well to suggest that this subject is not
treated in absolute seriousness, and that all assertions must not
be taken au pied de la lettre. First, then, and most
important, come the stockholders, for without them the
Metropolitan would close. The majority of these fortunate
people and their guests look upon the opera as a social function,
where one can meet one’s friends and be seen, an
entertaining antechamber in which to linger until it’s time
to “go on,” her Box being to-day as necessary a part
of a great lady’s outfit as a country house or a
ball-room.
Second are those who attend because it has become the correct
thing to be seen at the opera. There is so much wealth in
this city and so little opportunity for its display, so many
people long to go about who are asked nowhere, that the opera has
been seized upon as a centre in which to air rich apparel and
elbow the “world.” This list fills a large part
of the closely packed parquet and first balcony.
Third, and last, come the lovers of music, who mostly inhabit
greater altitudes.
The motive of the typical box-owner is simple. Her night
at the opera is the excuse for a cosy little dinner, one woman
friend (two would spoil the effect of the box) and four men,
without counting the husband, who appears at dinner, but rarely
goes further. The pleasant meal and the subsequent smoke
are prolonged until 9 or 9.30, when the men are finally dragged
murmuring from their cigars. If she has been fortunate and
timed her arrival to correspond with an entr’acte,
my lady is radiant. The lights are up, she can see who are
present, and the public can inspect her toilet and jewels as she
settles herself under the combined gaze of the house, and
proceeds to hold an informal reception for the rest of the
evening. The men she has brought with her quickly cede
their places to callers, and wander yawning in the lobby or
invade the neighboring boxes and add their voices to the general
murmur.
Although there is much less talking than formerly, it is the
toleration of this custom at all by the public that indicates
(along with many other straws) that we are not a music-loving
people. Audible conversation during a performance would not
be allowed for a moment by a Continental audience. The
little visiting that takes place in boxes abroad is done during
the entr’actes, when people retire to the salons
back of their loges to eat ices and chat. Here those
little parlors are turned into cloak-rooms, and small talk goes
on in many boxes during the entire performance. The joke or
scandal of the day is discussed; strangers in town, or literary
and artistic lights—“freaks,” they are
discriminatingly called—are pointed out, toilets passed in
review, and those dreadful two hours passed which, for some
undiscovered reason, must elapse between a dinner and a
dance. If a favorite tenor is singing, and no one happens
to be whispering nonsense over her shoulder, my lady may listen
in a distrait way. It is not safe, however, to count on
prolonged attention or ask her questions about the
performance. She is apt to be a bit hazy as to who is
singing, and with the exception of Faust and
Carmen, has rudimentary ideas about plots. Singers
come and go, weep, swoon, or are killed, without interfering with
her equanimity. She has, for instance, seen the
Huguenots and the Rheingold dozens of times, but
knows no more why Raoul is brought blindfolded to Chenonceaux, or
what Wotan and Erda say to each other in their interminable
scenes, than she does of the contents of the Vedas. For the
matter of that, if three or four principal airs were suppressed
from an opera and the scenery and costumes changed, many in that
chattering circle would, I fear, not know what they were
listening to.
Last winter, when Melba sang in Aida, disguised by dark
hair and a brown skin, a lady near me vouchsafed the opinion that
the “little black woman hadn’t a bad voice;” a
gentleman (to whom I remarked last week “that as Sembrich
had sung Rosina in the Barber, it was rather a shock to
see her appear as that lady’s servant in the Mariage de
Figaro”) looked his blank amazement until it was
explained to him that one of those operas was a continuation of
the other. After a pause he remarked, “They are not
by the same composer, anyway! Because the first’s by
Rossini, and the Mariage is by Bon Marché.
I’ve been at his shop in Paris.”
The presence of the second category—the would-be
fashionable people—is not so easily accounted for.
Their attendance can hardly be attributed to love of melody, as
they are, if anything, a shade less musical than the
box-dwellers, who, by the bye, seem to exercise an irresistible
fascination, to judge by the trend of conversation and direction
of glasses. Although an imposing and sufficiently attentive
throng, it would be difficult to find a less discriminating
public than that which gathers nightly in the Metropolitan
parterre. One wonders how many of those people care for
music and how many attend because it is expensive and
“swell.”
They will listen with the same bland contentment to either bad
or good performances so long as a world-renowned artist (some one
who is being paid a comfortable little fortune for the evening)
is on the stage. The orchestra may be badly led (it often
is); the singers may flat—or be out of voice; the
performance may go all at sixes and sevens—there is never a
murmur of dissent. Faults that would set an entire audience
at Naples or Milan hissing are accepted herewith ignorant
approval.
The unfortunate part of it is that this weakness of ours has
become known. The singers feel they can give an American
audience any slipshod performance. I have seen a favorite
soprano shrug her shoulders as she entered her dressing-room and
exclaim: “Mon Dieu! How I shuffled through
that act! They’d have hooted me off the stage in
Berlin, but here no one seems to care. Did you notice the
baritone to-night? He wasn’t on the key once during
our duo. I cannot sing my best, try as I will, when I hear
the public applauding good and bad alike!”
It is strange that our pleasure-loving rich people should have
hit on the opera as a favorite haunt. We and the English
are the only race who will attend performances in a foreign
language which we don’t understand. How can
intelligent people who don’t care for music go on, season
after season, listening to operas, the plots of which they
ignore, and which in their hearts they find dull?
Is it so very amusing to watch two middle-aged ladies nagging
each other, at two o’clock in the morning, on a public
square, as they do in Lohengrin? Do people find the
lecture that Isolde’s husband delivers to the guilty lovers
entertaining? Does an opera produce any illusion on my
neighbors? I wish it did on me! I see too plainly the
paint on the singers’ hot faces and the cords straining in
their tired throats! I sit on certain nights in agony,
fearing to see stout Romeo roll on the stage in apoplexy!
The sopranos, too, have a way, when about to emit a roulade, that
is more suggestive of a dentist’s chair, and the attendant
gargle, than of a love phrase.
When two celebrities combine in a final duo, facing the public
and not each other, they give the impression of victims whom an
unseen inquisitor is torturing. Each turn of his screw
draws out a wilder cry. The orchestra (in the pay of the
demon) does all it can to prevent their shrieks from reaching the
public. The lovers in turn redouble their efforts; they are
purple in the face and glistening with perspiration.
Defeat, they know, is before them, for the orchestra has the
greater staying power! The flutes bleat; the trombones
grunt; the fiddles squeal; an epileptic leader cuts wildly into
the air about him. When, finally, their strength exhausted,
the breathless human beings, with one last ear-piercing note,
give up the struggle and retire, the public, excited by the
unequal contest, bursts into thunders of applause.
Why wouldn’t it be a good idea, in order to avoid these
painful exhibitions, to have an arrangement of screens, with the
singing people behind and a company of young and attractive
pantomimists going through the gestures and movements in
front? Otherwise, how can the most imaginative natures lose
themselves at an opera? Even when the singers are comely,
there is always that eternal double row of stony-faced witnesses
in full view, whom no crimes astonish and no misfortunes
melt. It takes most of the poetry out of Faust’s
first words with Marguerite, to have that short interview
interrupted by a line of old, weary women shouting, “Let us
whirl in the waltz o’er the mount and the
plain!” Or when Scotch Lucy appears in a smart
tea-gown and is good enough to perform difficult exercises before
a half-circle of Italian gentlemen in pantalets and ladies in
court costumes, does she give any one the illusion of an
abandoned wife dying of a broken heart alone in the
Highlands? Broken heart, indeed! It’s much more
likely she’ll die of a ruptured blood-vessel!
Philistines in matters musical, like myself, unfortunate
mortals whom the sweetest sounds fail to enthrall when connected
with no memory or idea, or when prolonged beyond a limited
period, must approach the third group with hesitation and
awe. That they are sincere, is evident. The rapt
expressions of their faces, and their patience, bear testimony to
this fact. For a long time I asked myself, “Where
have I seen that intense, absorbed attitude before?”
Suddenly one evening another scene rose in my memory.
Have you ever visited Tangiers? In the market-place of
that city you will find the inhabitants crouched by hundreds
around their native musicians. When we were there, one old
duffer—the Wagner, doubtless, of the place—was having
an immense success. No matter at what hour of the day we
passed through that square, there was always the same spellbound
circle of half-clad Turks and Arabs squatting silent while
“Wagner” tinkled to them on a three-stringed lute and
chanted in a high-pitched, dismal whine—like the squeaking
of an unfastened door in the wind. At times, for no
apparent reason, the never-varying, never-ending measure would be
interrupted by a flutter of applause, but his audience remained
mostly sunk in a hypnotic apathy. I never see a
“Ring” audience now without thinking of that scene
outside the Bab-el-Marsa gate, which has led me to ask different
people just what sensations serious music produced upon
them. The answers have been varied and interesting.
One good lady who rarely misses a German opera confessed that
sweet sounds acted upon her like opium. Neither scenery nor
acting nor plot were of any importance. From the first
notes of the overture to the end, she floated in an ecstatic
dream, oblivious of time and place. When it was over she
came back to herself faint with fatigue. Another professed
lover of Wagner said that his greatest pleasure was in following
the different “motives” as they recurred in the
music. My faith in that gentleman was shaken, however, when
I found the other evening that he had mistaken Van Dyck for Jean
de Reszké through an entire performance. He may be a
dab at recognizing his friends the “motives,” but his
discoveries don’t apparently go as far as tenors!
No one doubts that hundreds of people unaffectedly love German
opera, but that as many affect to appreciate it in order to
appear intellectual is certain.
Once upon a time the unworthy member of an ultra-serious
“Browning” class in this city, doubting the sincerity
of her companions, asked permission to read them a poem of the
master’s which she found beyond her comprehension.
When the reading was over the opinion of her friends was
unanimous. “Nothing could be simpler! The lines
were lucidity itself! Such close reasoning
etc.” But dismay fell upon them when the naughty lady
announced, with a peal of laughter, that she had been reading
alternate lines from opposite pages. She no longer disturbs
the harmony of that circle!
Bearing this tale in mind, I once asked a musician what
proportion of the audience at a “Ring” performance he
thought would know if alternate scenes were given from two of
Wagner’s operas, unless the scenery enlightened them.
His estimate was that perhaps fifty per cent might find out the
fraud. He put the number of people who could give an
intelligent account of those plots at about thirty per
hundred.
The popularity of music, he added, is largely due to the fact
that it saves people the trouble of thinking. Pleasant
sounds soothe the nerves, and, if prolonged long enough in a
darkened room will, like the Eastern tom-toms, lull the senses
into a mild form of trance. This must be what the gentleman
meant who said he wished he could sleep as well in a
“Wagner” car as he did at one of his operas!
Being a tailless old fox, I look with ever-increasing
suspicion on the too-luxuriant caudal appendages of my neighbors,
and think with amusement of the multitudes who during the last
ten years have sacrificed themselves upon the altar of grand
opera—simple, kindly souls, with little or no taste for
classical music, who have sat in the dark (mentally and
physically), applauding what they didn’t understand, and
listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to
us outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage. I am
convinced the greater number would have preferred a jolly
performance of Mme. Angot or the Cloches de
Corneville, cut in two by a good ballet.
It is, however, so easy to be mistaken on subjects of this
kind that generalizing is dangerous. Many great authorities
have liked tuneless music. One of the most telling
arguments in its favor was recently advanced by a
foreigner. The Chinese ambassador told us last winter in a
club at Washington that Wagner’s was the only European
music that he appreciated and enjoyed. “You
see,” he added, “music is a much older art with us
than in Europe, and has naturally reached a far greater
perfection. The German school has made a long step in
advance, and I can now foresee a day not far distant when, under
its influence, your music will closely resemble our
own.”
